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Synchronicity

My friend Norm forwarded me one of those Amazon “If you bought this, you’ll like this” marketing e-mails this morning, on which it said: “We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Old Man’s War by John Scalzi also purchased books by Chris Roberson. For this reason, you might like to know that Chris Roberson’s Here, There & Everywhere is now available in paperback.” Norm noted it’s the first time he’d been marketed to for reading me. There’s a first time for everything, is there not.

Well, naturally, I wanted to know more about this Chris Roberson fellow, so I Googled him and found his site, on which he has a blog. And what’s on the top of his blog entry queue? This entry, about little ol’ me. Yeah, it’s a small world, after all.

Honestly, how many more signs from God and/or Amazon do you need? I went ahead and ordered my copy.

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7 thoughts on “Synchronicity”

This seems like another example of how the boundaries between roles are blurring. Traditionally, another author’s blurb on the cover of a book were completely meaningless to me. Just because I like or respect an author’s writing doesn’t mean that I share their opinions or tastes. But I know that if you read Here, There & Everywhere and give it a thumbs up on the Whatever, I’m probably going to find it to purchase myself because this blog has helped put a context on any statements you make.

Perhaps there’s something to consider about reviewing books here as part of an Old Boy Network (pardon the pun), or even an out-and-out revenue stream.

I originally read about Roxanne Bonaventure’s exploits in the now-defunct Clockwork Storybook, and I fondly look back on all of the plucky girl’s adventures. In _Here, There & Everywhere_, Chris dealt with a lot of concepts that are typically the domain of hard SF stories where the protagonists are almost exclusively elderly professors of some sort, but he wrapped up all those scientific theories in a tale of a teenage girl growing up with a time machine by her side. Of course Chris still did his research on the subject matter and managed to neatly explain everything by the end of the book, but he pulled it all off in a much more flowing and amiable way than many others who’ve tackled similar themes.

Perhaps it’s just me, but stories of this type tend to consist of meandering and badly drawn-out information dumps, yet _Here, There & Everywhere_ was nothing like that. In fact, I still can’t help but smile at one part of the book in which Roxanne uses her reality-hopping gadget to simply learn more about a boy she fancies. The whole book is filled with such gems, and it’s simply a fun and enjoyable read.